Page:An Index of Prohibited Books (1840).djvu/107

 reasons, if not the principal, why so strong an effort is now made by Papal advocates to shift the trial to a new ground, where an inferior tribunal is concerned; where the facts are distant and may be supposed to be comparatively obsolete; and where the case is confined to the person of one man, instead of embracing, not only two other persons equally and by name implicated, but the vast, unlimited mass of those who are included in the general and sweeping condemnation of all who teach the obnoxious philosophy. As the Index of Rome stood, up to the present time, or 1835, every baptized individual who dared to believe and teach that the earth and other planets revolve round the sun, and that the sun does not make all sorts of eccentric revolutions round them, was subject to the literary ban of the Roman Church, and, what was an infinitely more important concern to him, to all the specified penalties which she could inflict. This would be no enviable predicament, where that church had power, and inducement to use it.

It will be useful, though not necessary, to visit the new ground chosen by the adversary, and to remain some time upon it, if for no other reason, to expose and put for good to